Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology
Foreword
Ron Cole, editor in chief
The field of human language technology covers a broad range of activities with the eventual goal of enabling people to communicate with machines using natural communication skills. Research and development activities include the coding, recognition, interpretation, translation, and generation of language.
The study of human language technology is a multidisciplinary enterprise, requiring expertise in areas of linguistics, psychology, engineering and computer science. Creating machines that will interact with people in a graceful and natural way using language requires a deep understanding of the acoustic and symbolic structure of language, (the domain of linguistics) and the mechanisms and strategies that people use to communicate with each other (the domain of psychology). Given the remarkable ability of people to converse under adverse conditions, such as noisy social gatherings or band-limited communication channels, advances in signal processing are essential to produce robust systems (the domain of electrical engineering). Advances in computer science are needed to create the architectures and platforms needed to represent and utilize all of this knowledge. Collaboration among researchers in each of these areas is needed to create multimodal and multimedia systems that combine speech, facial cues and gestures both to improve language understanding and to produce more natural and intelligible speech by animated characters.
Human language technologies play a key role in the age of information. Today, the benefits of information and services on computer networks are unavailable to those without access to computers or the skills to use them. As the importance of interactive networks increases in commerce and daily life, those who do not have access to computers or the skills to use them are further handicapped from becoming productive members of society.
Advances in human language technology offer the promise of nearly universal access to on-line information and services. Since almost everyone speaks and understands a language, the development of spoken language systems will allow the average person to interact with computers without special skills or training, using common devices such as the telephone. These systems will combine spoken language understanding and generation to allow people to interact with computers using speech to obtain information on virtually any topic, to conduct business and to communicate with each other more effectively.
Advances in the processing of speech, text and images are needed to make sense of the massive amounts of information now available via computer networks. A student's query: "Tell me about global warming," should set in motion a set of procedures that locate, organize and summarize all available information about global warming from books, periodicals, newscasts, satellite images and other sources. Translation of speech or text from one language to another is needed to access and interpret all available material and present it to the student in her native language.
This book surveys the state of the art of human language technology. The goal of the survey is to provide an interested reader with an overview of the field---the main areas of work, the capabilities and limitations of current technology, and the technical challenges that must be overcome to realize the vision of graceful human computer interaction using natural communication skills.
The book consists of thirteen chapters written by 97 different authors. In order to create a coherent and readable volume, a great deal of effort was expended to provide consistent structure and level of presentation within and across chapters. The editorial board met six times over a two year period. During the first two meetings, the structure of the survey was defined, including topics, authors, and guidelines to authors. During each of the final four meetings (in four different countries), each author's contribution was carefully reviewed and revisions were requested, with the aim of making the survey as inclusive, up-to-date and internally consistent as possible.
This book is due to the efforts of many people. The survey was the brainchild of Oscar Garcia (then program director at the National Science Foundation in the United States), and Antonio Zampolli, professor at the University of Pisa, Italy. Oscar Garcia and Mark Liberman helped organize the survey and participated in the selection of topics and authors; their insights and contributions to the survey are gratefully acknowledged. I thank all of my colleagues on the editorial board, who dedicated remarkable amounts of time and effort to the survey. I am particularly grateful to Joseph Mariani for his diligence and support during the past two years, and to Victor Zue for his help and guidance throughout this project. I thank Hans Uszkoreit and Antonio Zampolli for their help in finding publishers. The survey owes much to the efforts of Vince Weatherill, the production editor, who worked with the editorial board and the authors to put the survey together, and to Don Colton, who indexed the book and proofread it several times. Finally, on behalf of the editorial board, we thank the authors of this survey, whose talents and patience were responsible for the quality of this product.
The survey was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to Ron Cole, Victor Zue and Mark Liberman, and by the European Commission. Additional support was provided by the Center for Spoken Language Understanding at the Oregon Graduate Institute and the University of Pisa, Italy.
Kauii, Hawaii, USA
January 31, 1996
posted by Nguyen Hieu @ 2:17 PM
0 comments
